t only took Pierre Pryer Sr. six months to
a year to work his way up from dishwasher to head chef at The Iron Horse Grill
downtown the first time he worked there,
from 1987 until 1998. He returned to the
restaurant at the beginning of February this
year—as executive chef this time.
In 1987, Pryer was unemployed and
thinking of joining the Army. He took the
necessary tests for enrollment, and he passed.
Not long before that, he saw Iron Horse for
the first time and put in a job application.
“It was a Friday morning; I’ll never forget. The recruiter called me and said, ‘I’m
coming to pick you up and bring you down
here, and you’ll be out of here in two days,’”
Pryer recalls. Instead, he told the recruiter
that he’d find his own ride to the office. “But
I didn’t go. I didn’t want to leave. I got a call
the following Saturday about 3 p.m. from
the owner (of Iron Horse) John McWilliams;
he needed a dishwasher, and I immediately
took the job.”
After working two weeks, Pryer cut his
thumb open on the slicer and had to get 13
stitches. He took about a month off to let
his thumb heal, but when he called for his
job, the restaurant had hired someone in his
place and offered Pryer two days of work
per week.
“I took the two days a week, but I was
a man on a mission,” Pryer says. He made
himself as helpful as possible around the res-

CONTENTS

taurant and in the kitchen, and the owner
took an interest in Pryer. Six months after
Pryer started working, the head chef spontaneously quit. Williams called Pryer outside
for a chat.
“Look, I need a chef. I don’t have anyone to bring in right now, but I’ve noticed
that you’ve been in the kitchen doing everything from dishes to prepping to cooking. You seem to enjoy what you’re doing.
If you want, I’ll give this job to you,” Pryer
recalls him saying. “He said, …. ‘I’m going
to win with you, or I’m going to lose with
you. I think you can do what I need to
have done.’”
Pryer, a Jackson native, graduated from
Murrah High School and attended Hinds
Community College for a stint where he
studied hotel and motel restaurant management. He grew up in a family of seven
children, and his mother passed away when
he was 9.
“My love of cooking came from my
dad,” says Pryer, who has one son of his own,
a senior at Wingfield High School named
Pierre Pryer Jr.
Pryer’s father, King Solomon Pryer Sr.,
always worked two jobs, and his night job
was always cooking somewhere. “He had this
great vision for us to go out and make our
names known,” Pryer says about his dad. “So
I guess we’re somewhat doing that now.”
—Briana Robinson

Cover photo of seafood from The Islander
by Trip Burns

8 Bettering Education

The nonprofit Better Schools=Better Jobs wants to put the question of full state
education funding to the voters on the 2015 ballot.

26 An Unforgiving World

“Death in the world of ‘Dark Souls’ is an inevitability, not an end, and both
the narrative and mechanics make use of this. Perishing causes the player to
drop all his unspent Souls (experience and currency rolled into one) into a
bloodstain, and returns the player to the last activated bonfire. Returning to
one’s bloodstain restores what was lost; dying before this happens causes them
to be lost forever.”—Nick Judin

32 The Grand Adventure

In “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” Wes Anderson uses whimsy and his familiar batch
of dry-esque humor to tell the story of a woman’s murder just days after leaving the
Grand Budapest Hotel.

e is a food god in Mississippi.
On my last trip to Oxford a
few weeks ago, we were there two
nights and visited four different
John Currence restaurants. The first night,
we met my friend, professor Cynthia Joyce
at The Lamar Lounge for drinks and a veggie
burger in a very meat-focused joint.
On the second night, we joined two
other journalism professors, Curtis Wilkie
and Joe Atkins, for a delicious dinner and war
stories in the (and ironically named) Snack
Bar (yes, they always have at least one excellent veggie option. And frites, of course).
Then, just because you must, we had
a nightcap upstairs at City Grocery on the
Square. The next morning, we met our
friends Camp Best, Cristen Hemmins and
Sean Higgins back at Currence’s Big Bad
Breakfast, which happens to be next door to
Snack Bar in that strip-mall-turned-culinary
district. The five of us chatted so much (all
good, from race relations and LGBT issues
to that-damn-flag) that I barely took time
to savor a perfect breakfast, but I still dream
about that tomato gravy.
Put simply: John Currence is a chef
foodies can love. He is a businessman, and
he is a food artist, and he is a vital part of
Oxford’s, and thus Mississippi’s, renaissance
as a creative-class destination and place to
put down roots and make a difference.
Currence also buried his scimitar into
the supporters of SB 2681, the latest wingnut attempt to keep Mississippi known
as a hateful place disguised, as always, as a
“religious” effort.
Currence, who appropriately tweets
@bigbadchef—and whose Twitter page
is wallpapered with “Thou shalt not talk
sh*t”—was no more pleased than I and so
many Mississippians were when the Legislature passed the bill that many of believe will
be tantamount to Jim Crow lows against our
LGBT neighbors, employees and loved ones.

Pardon Currence’s French on this one (as you
laugh out loud): “I reserve my right to refuse
service to every limp-d*ck homophobe who
voted In favor of new Nazissippi law today.
F*cking shameful.”
OK, not all his tweets on the issue were
as saucy (dang it), but he didn’t let up, soon
tweeting: “Yesterday MS legislature passed
Religious Freedom Restoration Act, gives

‘I’m Republican ...
and humiliated by my
party and my state
legislature today.’
folks right to refuse service to anyone. #segregation.” He even took on fellow foodies (or
so their Twitter handles indicated): “you obviously have no idea how f#cking Draconian
this law is and what its implications are....”
Then after someone excoriated him
for his language, adding, “The nastiest hate
comes from the left,” Currence fired back:
“I’m Republican ... and humiliated by my
party and my state legislature today. Why
don’t you look in the mirror. You lashed
out 1st.” So sayeth the big, bad chef.
Yes, the Mississippi Legislature, and
then Gov. Phil Bryant, surrounded by radical-right political leaders from Mississippi
and beyond (all white men, mostly of a certain age), used his poison pen to brand our
state once again with the tattoo of hate.
Meantime, people like John Currence
and so many of you work their fingers to
the bone and open businesses and hire
people and struggle to change the reputation of our state, improve its tax base and
provide needed kindling to our economic

development fire—as they fight against us.
Currence should be angry. We all
should be cursing what is happening now
in the 21st century in our state. Even as we
watch our citizenry evolve and young people
decide to stay rather than run and so many
people work to heal the past’s divisions, these
fools come along and just rip our wounds
open so we all have to start over.
Meantime, the people we love and
admire who happen to prefer to love someone of their own gender, are used as political pawns who aren’t treated as if they
are human beings, with equal rights to
everyone else. We’ve seen this before, Mississippi. We’ve lived through it. We’re still dealing with its disastrous effects.
Before the Civil Rights Movement and
the feds and other freedom fighters of all races forced Mississippi to change its laws, we
“protected” people who wanted to discriminate against others based on their skin tone.
We had laws against interracial marriage,
claiming that the Bible told us to. We hid
behind the idea of “religious freedom” to do
anything to people our leaders told us were
inferior, and sinful, and ungodly.
Meantime, many “good” people didn’t
speak out. Maybe they were afraid of boycotts, maybe they were afraid of physical
violence, maybe they were afraid of going
against the herd. But they didn’t speak out.
As a result, the haters were able to spread it,
using state law and the Bible as an excuse.
It took federal laws to tell Mississippi
and other states then that we couldn’t use
state law as cover to discriminate against
people of color. It looks like it’ll take federal
intervention again to tell these terrible state
leaders that what they are doing is wrong.
Meantime, though, it’s up to the rest of
us to step up—and to speak out (and maybe
cuss a little) when the laws are hurting other
people, whether or not they apply to us. It’s
also up to us to point out the hypocrisy of

using beautiful spiritual texts, written to get
people to love each other, as cover for hate.
Currence did the right thing with those
tweets. Sure, he could lose some customers,
just as the JFP might because I wrote this.
But I suspect he knows as we have learned
that doing good business means being willing to speak out against efforts to hurt our
customers and our loved ones and our employees. When the JFP started, some people
predicted that we couldn’t last a year as a progressive newspaper in Mississippi—reporting on abortion rights, supporting LGBT
citizens, challenging racism—because businesses wouldn’t advertise with us, and their
customers would demand it.
Our paper turns 12 this year.
Sure, we’ve lost an advertiser here and
there (including one after a former editor,
who was lesbian, wrote an award-winning
column about the pain of watching Mississippians vote against allowing her to marry)
due to our coverage, and some anonymous
yo-yo or another calls for a boycott now and
again. But these efforts are predictable and,
I believe, doomed to fail precisely because
what we do is infused with love of other people, including those who are born different
or who make other choices.
I’ve said it before: We Mississippians
have a choice now. It is our moment. We can
repeat the past, where we shrug and believe
we’re powerless against hateful efforts, or we
can stand up, speak out and maybe even
cuss a little to get our point across. We can
even start a Facebook campaign like Mitchell
Moore of Campbell’s Bakery did (see page 7)
to encourage small businesses to put out the
welcome mat to LGBT customers.
We must believe in our own power—to
change hateful laws and to vote out every
single person who tries to keep us mired in a
Jim Crow-type world. Stand up, Mississippi.
We are better than this. Let’s prove it.
On, and pass that tomato gravy.

April 9 - 15, 2014

CONTRIBUTORS

4

Kathleen Mitchell

R.L. Nave

Trip Burns

Anna Wolfe

Jesse Houston

Kristie Lipford

Brittany Sanford

David Joseph

Features Editor Kathleen M.
Mitchell likes fonts, jorts and
photo books, among other
things. She hopes to be a professional learner some day. She
coordinated the cover package.

R.L. Nave, native Missourian and news editor, roots
for St. Louis (and the Mizzou
Tigers)—and for Jackson. Send
him news tips at rlnave@jacksonfreepress.com or call him at
601-362-6121 ext. 12. He wrote
news stories.

Trip Burns is a graduate of the
University of Mississippi where
he studied English and sociology. He enjoys the films of Stanley Kubrick. He took photos for
the issue including the cover.

Anna Wolfe is a senior communication major at Mississippi
State University who strives to
use writing as a tool to advance
social justice. She writes for the
Starkville Free Press, as well as
the JFP. She wrote about the
20-week abortion bill.

Jesse Houston is a chef and
graduate of the Texas Culinary
Academy. He is currently consulting, launching exciting popup restaurants, and planning
to open his own restaurant in
Jackson soon. He contributed
to the cover package.

Memphis native Kristie Lipford
has a doctorate in sociology. She nightcaps to Coltrane’s
“Africa Brass Sessions” and
Alice’s “Ptah” when she’s feeling wild. Cupcakes make her
smile. She wrote a music story.

Editorial Intern and New
Orleans native Brittany Sanford
is a senior at Belhaven University. She loves God, family,
fashion and writing. She helped
factcheck for the issue.

David Joseph, former restaurateur and long-time Jacksonian
serves as the director of operations for Jackson Free Press.
He enjoys watching JFP flourish
and his two new grandchildren.
He’s just plain awesome.